BUET campus abuzz with social entrepreneurship solutions

It was 30 October, 2014 - another hartal day in Dhaka. Yet, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) campus was abuzz with formally clad youth with anxious dispositions, eagerly making last-minute adjustments to their presentation files in their laptops and going over their presentation notes for the final time. It was the day of the ‘Hult Prize at BUET’ competition, where a group of aspiring entrepreneurs would be selected to represent BUET in the regional finals of the Hult Prize competition and, hopefully, to advance to the global finals to represent BUET on the world stage.
The Hult Prize is a start-up accelerator programme for social entrepreneurship, hosted by Clinton Global Initiative (established by former President Bill Clinton as an initiative of the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation) and the Hult International Business School. Every year, Bill Clinton sets a challenge for young entrepreneurs to solve with their proposed social business solution. Student teams from college campuses all around the world pitch their idea in front of a board of CGI delegates at CGI annual meeting in New York. The winning team is awarded an amount of USD 1 million in seed capital to establish their start-up company financed by the Hult Family, a renowned Swedish industrialist family.  
The Hult Prize initiative was conceived of by its current CEO Ahmad Ashkar.  Ashkar left the banking industry during the economic downturn of 2009 and went on to pursue an MBA degree at Hult International Business School, where a lecture by "One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)" Director Chuck Kane introduced him to the concept of social entrepreneurship. He founded the Hult Prize as a crowdsourcing platform for attracting innovative business solutions to rampant social problems like lack of food, drinking water, childhood education etc from young and enthusiastic minds from all over the world. In 2013, the prize attracted more than 10,000 MBA and undergraduate students from around the world. Today, the Hult Prize is the world's largest student competition for social good.
Students can either apply as an independent team, or they can pitch their ideas as representatives from their respective institutions. Colleges host the "Hult Prize at" event on their premises to select a team to send to the regional finals.
The regional finals are hosted at one of Hult International Business School's five campuses in Boston, San Francisco, London, Dubai and Shanghai. One team is selected from each of the host cities and sent to Hult International Business School campus in Boston for a summer training camp, called "Hult Accelerator". The teams, thus prepared and vetted, are then sent to pitch their ideas in front of a group of CGI delegates at the annual CGI meeting in New York.
This year, BUET was selected for the first time ever as a host institution of Hult Prize. In the words of the Campus Director Nazmus Sadat, a student of Materials and Metallurgical Engineering (MME), "I believe in three Cs, Choice, Chance and Change. You must make the choice to take the chance if you want anything in life to change. Besides this, one needs to be focused on one's goal and needs to be crazy to change the world. People who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. Hult Prize event can be the first step to that revolutionary journey but it should not be limited to hult prize competition!"
With this year's Hult Prize challenge "Early Childhood Education - the Unmet Need of the Century" in mind, business ideas were called for from student teams in the form of a summary abstract and an initial selection of 15 teams among 120+registered teams were shortlisted by the Jury Board. The Jury Board consisted of the following:
1)    Dr. Tanvir Ahmed, Assistant Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, BUET
2)    Dr. Md. Musleh Uddin Hasan, Assistant Professor, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, BUET
3)    Mr. Mahmudul Hasan Shohag, Chairman, OnnoRokom Group.  
To select a representative team for the regional finals, the "Hult Prize at BUET" contest was held in the central auditorium of BUET on 30th October, 2014. Each team, consisting of three to five members, delivered 8 minute long presentations followed by a 4 minute Q&A session with the judges and Team Halcyon emerged as the winning team with their idea of "EduCart: School on Wheels".
The team members are - 1) Rajat Ghosh (EEE) 2) Md. Arif Istiaq Khan(CIVIL)  3) Muntaseer Bunian (Department of MME) 4) Prattay Deepta Kairy(EEE) 5) Md. Moinul Islam(NAME). "EduCart" is basically a cheap, custom-made caravan capable of travelling to remote areas and carrying state-of-the-art pedagogic materials in its compartments. The idea is to reach out to under-privileged kids aged 2-6 years who are left out of pre-schooling services available only to middle and upper class children. Modern educational materials will be utilised to foster hidden creative talents of these indigent kids through music, art, dance and other such activities; reading skills would also be imparted to them to bridge the word gap between educated children of solvent families and the uneducated children of poor families, as recent research has shown that children who learn to read early are well equipped to face the challenges of adult life. Free food would be offered to the families of the children as incentives to spare the educators some time, as well as pay a meagre fee to help sustain the arrangement, well within the daily income of these under-privileged families. The market research that went into this idea as well as the potential sustainability of this idea in the harsh business environment of indigent society are what propelled this idea to the number 1 position in the vote of the Jury and the audience.
Team Halcyon will be attending the regional finals at Dubai, to be hosted on March 13-14 of 2015. If they qualify, they will then go on to participate in the Hult Accelerator Programme in Boston from 30th June to 15th August of 2015. The finals of Hult Prize 2015 will be hosted at the annual CGI meeting in New York on September, date to be announced later.
All in all, this is the first time an international student Social Entrepreneurship contest (and also the largest of its kind) was hosted at a public engineering university in Bangladesh. With more such contests to be held in the coming years, it is hoped that the budding engineers of the country would apply their well-tested merit and grit to fabricating home-grown social entrepreneurship solutions to the most demanding social problems of the country. With its brightest minds committed to caring for its most unfortunate lot, it is only a matter of time before our country takes its place on the world stage with its head held high.

The writer is in the Department of Materials and Metallurgical Engineering, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET),
shuvro789@hotmail.com